Tory aide lobbies city for developers
McSweeney, party organizer and PM’s friend, contacted councillors about shopping centre project
An aide to a local Conservative member of Parliament has lobbied the city government for private clients, selling his ability to influence Ottawa’s councillors.
Colin McSweeney is an assistant to Leeds-Grenville Conservative MP Gord Brown, but he’s much more than that among local Tories. He’s an Eastern Ontario organizer for the party and a friend of Prime Minister Stephen Harper (the Globe and Mail reported in a political gossip column a couple of years ago they went to see the movie Crazy Stupid Love together).
He’s a regular at community events in Kanata, where he lives, often photographed alongside Coun. Allan Hubley; he’s a sometime vicepresident of the Glen Cairn Community Association who got Harper out to turn on the local Christmas light display last year.
McSweeney is also a former president of the Central Canada Exhibition, where Coun. Doug Thompson has been a board member. He’s a fairly regular presence at Ottawa city council meetings, hanging around with political staffers, often in a blue and black ski jacket with a Conservative party logo on it.
(His Parliament Hill boss, Brown, is an old friend of Mayor Jim Watson from their time together at Carleton University. Watson calls him “Gordie.”)
According to the city’s lobbying registry, McSweeney contacted councillors Thompson, Stephen Blais and Tim Tierney in late November on behalf of a Toronto developer planning to build a small shopping centre in Thompson’s Osgoode ward, at the corner of Bank Street and Mitch Owens Road. The builder, Otis Group, wanted to get the development hooked up to city water pipes that run nearby, after saying earlier this year its project didn’t need them.
The registration lists McSweeney’s work as being that of a “consultant,” which means he “lobbies for payment on behalf of a client.”
None of McSweeney, Thompson or Tierney answered the Citizen’s requests to talk to them by the end of the day Tuesday. McSweeney didn’t respond to calls made to him at Brown’s office — where a fellow staffer said he works part-time hours but promised to send him an email right away — or at home.
Blais replied to an interview request by email, saying McSweeney called him in his capacity as vicechair of city council’s rural-affairs committee and asked him to consider Otis’s position.
“In the past I have supported similar exemptions where the landowner offers to pay for an extension of City water to their property to help develop commercial enterprise and create jobs,” he wrote. “As I understand it, Mr. McSweeney is a registered lobbyist with the City and has followed all of the rules for the reporting of our conversation.
“As an aside, I know Colin to be an honourable man — someone who works hard to raise his family and to make our community a better place to live.”
The city’s lobbying code of conduct has catch-all provisions instructing lobbyists to “avoid both the deed and the appearance of impropriety” and never to put councillors or city officials in a conflict of interest.
The code doesn’t cover McSweeney’s situation as a federal political aide in particular.
The federal government has enormous power over the City of Ottawa. It funds major infrastructure projects such as the light-rail system. It employs tens of thousands of people and decides where they’ll work. As a separate and higher order of government, it’s not subject to city bylaws or regulations, though it typically co-operates with them voluntarily, including contributing to about $175 million in payments in lieu of property taxes the city collects each year. The National Capital Commission is a huge landowner and the city can’t force it to do anything it doesn’t want to do.
According to the registry, McSweeney called Thompson, Blais and Tierney on Otis’s behalf the week before city council voted on a new official plan. At the crucial meeting, Blais and Thompson tried to get their fellow councillors to agree to extend city pipes to Otis’s development site, even though it violates the city’s policies on serving isolated properties; the effort failed on a vote of 7-17.
In addition to Otis, McSweeney is registered to represent Quinn Farm, a residential development project in Greely, though he hasn’t recorded any lobbying on the file yet.
The Canadian Press reported in 2010 that Conservative riding association members in Simcoe-Grey accused him, in a letter to Harper, of meddling in local business as the party tried to get rid of troublesome MP Helena Guergis. And when McSweeney worked for then-natural resources minister Lisa Raitt in 2011, he was part of an investigation by the federal lobbying commissioner into work his brother, Michael, had done to both lobby Raitt as president of Canada’s cement industry association and raise money for her at the same time.
Colin, tasked with organizing a political fundraiser for his boss, got Michael involved in selling tickets in a way that violated the federal lobbyists’ code of conduct by putting Raitt in an apparent conflict of interest, the commissioner found.